Sea lion shooting an inside job, feds say

Today comes word that federal officials are speculating that the shooting of those six sea lions trapped at the Bonneville Dam was not the work of some yay-hoo who slunk outta the woods knuckles a draggin’, but rather someone with a security clearance. Turns out the four California and two Steller sea lions were being kept in a supposedly secure area at the dam.

Investigators think the killers navigated tricky waters in a restricted area, knew how to drop the doors of two metal cages, and then began firing a high-powered rifle into six trapped sea lions, which would have tried to bolt at the first gunshot.

It looks like the perps probably arrived by boat. National Marine Fisheries Service spokesman Brian Gorman had this to say in an article by Michael Milstein of The Oregonian:

Whoever did this knew what he was doing. This was a very bold and open act.

And I had to chuckle at the words of Dennis Richey, executive director of Oregon Anglers (“the common sense political voice of the sports fisherman”):

This was well planned. Most fishermen aren’t that organized.

Fishermen, you see, are among those mad at the sea lions because they scarf down about 1/25th of the spring chinook salmon returning to the Columbia River. At least one Dateline Earth reader reacting to the news of the shootings seemed to think this was a small number, but it’s huge when you consider that fewer than 1 percent of the smolts that go out through the dammed river ever make it to the ocean and back. So it’s 1/25th of that (approximately) 1 percent* that’s at stake. And the spring chinook are protected under the Endangered Species Act.*

Still, I remain puzzled about the sea lion population explosion. Weren’t there a bunch of them around once upon a time? Why is this predation on returning salmon — presumably a natural phenomenon — raising such ire with the two-legged set? Isn’t this the way of nature?

* Update 4:02 p.m.: Two things: 1) I should also point out that the current runs are puny, from a historical perspective. For Columbia chinook, the estimate I’m looking at says there were maybe 5 million to 9 million returning each year in the late 1800s, compared to perhaps 250,000 to 900,000 or so in recent years. This estimate I’m looking at comes from early 2002. 2) Wild fish apparently come back at higher rates, perhaps 3 percent, than the hatchery fish, which are said to come back at a rate of less than 1 percent.